For people who support the TRON Project and love the BTRON architecture, the appearance of BrainPad TiPO/Denboogu TiPO is an exciting and historic event. This tiny personal computing device that weighs roughly 300 grams and fits in the palm of your hand offers workstation functionality, showing just what a outstanding architecture the BTRON architecture really is. Moreover, it can run for up to 50 hours using just two penlight batteries! How many other PDAs on the market are in this class?
TiPO comes with a software keyboard, handwritten character recognition software, and a World Wide Web browser, which can handle the TCP/IP, PPP, and FTP protocols. It also has electronic mail software, a personal information manager (PIM), a text editor (word processing software), a figure editor (graphics software), a spreadsheet application, a card database application, and personal computer communications software.
The hardware specs of TiPO are impressive too. TiPO has a 640 x 240-dot monchrome LCD screen with four gray levels. It uses 8 megabytes of ROM (for the operating system, dictionaries, fonts, etc.), 6 megabytes of RAM, and 8 megabytes of flash ROM (a portion of which is used by the system). For data transfer, TiPO has a PCMCIA Type II slot, an RS-232C port, and an IrDA infrared communication interface (for IrCOMM, IrLAN), which boasts speeds of 115kbps (IrDA-SIR) and 1Mbps (IrDA-FIR ).
Unfortunately, TiPO is only being marketed in the Japanese market at present. However, to give people in foreign countries a taste of what it is like to use this splendid piece of "electronic stationary," we are including a half-dozen screen shots below. Those who can handle Japanese and would like to purchase Denboogu TiPO should contact the Personal Media Corporation sales representative at sales@personal-media.co.jp. It retails for ¥102,794, consumption tax included.
Update: A new version of BrainPad TiPO, TiPO Plus, is now available for purchase. It's list price is 48,900 yen (consumption tax not included).
